Somaya Langley is Digital Preservation Manager at the Science Museum Group
The Science Museum Group (SMG) cares for over seven million collection objects and items, many of outstanding national and international significance. Our collection tells the story of our world, charting the development and history of science, technology, engineering, media, and medicine through many centuries. Situated across England, we provide access to the public through our five museums (Bradford, London, Manchester, Shildon, York), and through guided tours of our collection store at the Science and Innovation Park (Wroughton). SMG’s archive and library collection is accessible via five of our six sites, and our object photography is available via Collections Online.
Digital Preservation has now been running as a project at SMG for four years, and as a team (of two) for two years. This team collectively possesses over 50 years of combined experience in working at the intersection of creativity, culture, heritage, and technology.
What (we want) to preserve
For over forty years SMG has created, commissioned extraordinary digital and interactive works for exhibition across our galleries and in our touring exhibitions. Selected examples include Digitopolis (Science Museum) and Wired Worlds (National Science and Media Museum). We have won numerous awards for the works we have created and exhibited, for example our WonderLab AR App (2023 Webby Award) and David Rokeby’s Watched and Measured (2020 BAFTA Interactive Arts).
With foundations for managing and conserving our physical collections and photography to make our digital still images publicly available, the next logical progression for SMG was to preserve our digital collections.
Our digital collection includes a selection of content we have created and commissioned over the decades, and increasingly born-digital content that we are acquiring, which meets our Collection Development Policy. Our born-digital content is wide-ranging and often complex, encompassing 3D digital content, audiovisual recordings, digital and hybrid-digital artworks, digital interactives, digital photography, ss, scientific and research data (and associated publications), social media, software, time-based media, video, video games. As you can see, much of this is considered ‘complex digital objects’, and have previously written for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) about SMG’s digital collections and how we categorise them.
Why (we want to) preserve
The past four years of digital preservation activity at SMG has been filled with a solid amount of internal and external advocacy, building on a decade of advocacy by colleagues. Part of our work is introducing colleagues to the concept of ‘why preserve.’ We explain to our colleagues how preserving our audiovisual and digital collections can help them with their day-to-day work.
Engagement with our colleagues helps us garner support and illustrate the need to manage our digital content. Particularly over the past year we have colleagues throughout SMG now advocating on behalf of the Digital Preservation team. This in turn helps us collectively and strategically work towards meeting our organisational mandates as a UK national heritage organisation. Part of our goal is also to help share our skills and digital preservation approach with the national and international museum sector, and exchange learnings from our experiences with the digital and audiovisual preservation communities.
How (we want) to preserve
SMG is not yet able to procure and implement much-needed digital preservation infrastructure. Having infrastructure in place will be a critical turning point in SMG moving into ‘doing’ digital preservation at scale.
We are a grateful recipient of grant funding from The National Archives Risk and Resilience Grant to establish our first specialist ingest workstation (established in Manchester), and following this were also fortunate to receive funding from the then Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
Funding from BEIS and DSIT has allowed us to establish ingest workstations on another four of our museum sites (Bradford, London, Shildon, York).
Figure 1: Science Museum Group’s second ingest workstation. Science Museum Group
The workstations we have been able to procure are Digital Intelligence Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device (FRED) specialist digital forensics computers. We opted for Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics cards, i9-13900K processors, with a RAID-5 array, and procured two EIZO ColorEdge CG2700S 27 inch monitors for each computer. We have also procured peripherals including RME UCX II audio interfaces, and Neumann NDH 20 headphones. We are continuing to work with our ICT department and Cybersecurity team to establish our ingest workstations within SMG’s technology landscape, including designing and implementing a virus scanning workflow.
When (we want) to preserve
In an ideal world, all the audiovisual content at SMG should already have been preserved. In reality, that’s not the case. When we want to preserve, is now. However, for us, we will be preserving at scale as soon as we unlock funding and implement digital preservation large-scale infrastructure. The why is clear; it is now just a question of when.